Five Emerging Themes For The Indo-Pacific From Trump's Iran War

The surprisingly open recent discussions in Japanese official circles about whether Japan should throw aside its nuclear taboo and develop a nuclear capability probably reflect concerns both that other countries, in particular South Korea, might do so soon and that the American promise of“extended deterrence” – keeping allies protected under its own nuclear umbrella – may no longer be sufficiently reliable.

A second emerging theme is related to that latter worry: questions arising from the Iran war about the strength and reliability of American-led deterrence in the Indo-Pacific against China, North Korea and Russia.

America's war on Iran has put on full display the power and sophistication of its military forces. However what has been surprising is that in a war against an adversary that had already been greatly weakened by Israeli and American attacks in June last year, the American military so swiftly used up a high proportion of its stockpiles of its best weapons and missile-defence systems.

If this happens after just a few weeks of war against a weak adversary, how reliable can American deterrence be against a much stronger adversary, China?

Moreover, the war in Iran has entailed the transfer of ships, US Marine regiments, missile-defence systems and other assets from the Indo-Pacific into the Middle East.

The immediate gaps left by those transfers are not the main concern, although no military strategist in the Indo-Pacific can now keep out of mind the possibility, small though it may be, that the Iran war has created an opportunity that China or North Korea might be tempted to exploit.

The main concern is that, despite spending nearly US$1 trillion per year on defense the American military looks quite severely overstretched after just a short war.

Evidently, concerns that have been expressed in recent years about defense production capacity in the United States are valid. Yet what this also suggests is that too high a proportion of US defense spending may be going on fixed overhead costs such as US military bases all around the world and too little on nimble assets and on stockpiles.

A third theme from the Iran war is that it has taught many countries lessons about what defense against missile and drone attacks may really require in the future. The Gulf States of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have found themselves under repeated assaults from Iranian missiles and drones which their existing defense systems were unable to protect them from sufficiently well.

Part of the reason for this has been the global shortage of the sophisticated and costly missile interceptors used in American-made Patriot and THAAD defense systems that the Ukraine war had already exposed. But also the reason is that until now other countries have not had to learn from Ukraine's experience in being attacked by swarms of low-cost drones. Now, demand for Ukrainian-style anti-drone defences is going to boom, and not just in the Gulf. Japan, too, should be investing in anti-drone defences.

An obvious fourth theme is the need for stockpiles and diversified supply-chains of energy and of critical minerals.

There has been plenty of analysis in recent years of“chokepoints” that could provide leverage to one side during a war, but the potential use of the Strait of Hormuz in this way was surprisingly downplayed or even ignored by the United States. Yet this narrow body of water, which is shared by Iran and Oman, had long been identified as a chokepoint, given that one-fifth of the world's annual supply of oil flows through it in tankers.